Take the leap

Af­ter leav­ing high school, Michelle be­came a Pi­lates in­struc­tor and opened her own stu­dio. “I en­joyed it but I couldn’t kitesurf as much as I wanted to,” she says. What she re­ally wanted was a ca­reer in kitesurf­ing. But when she spoke to her friends about it, they seemed un­sup­port­ive. “Ev­ery­one thought, ‘Why are you do­ing this?’” she says. “But I thought, ‘I love kitesurf­ing so much and I re­ally want to pur­sue it; it’s my dream.’” She quit the stu­dio and two months into kitesurf­ing full­time, she’d al­ready seen an in­cred­i­ble im­prove­ment in her per­for­mance. Now, she’s con­sis­tently one of the topranked kitesurfers in SA.